Shahzad Ismaily

Shahzad Ismaily was born to Pakistani immigrant parents and grew up in a wholly bicultural household. While he holds a masters degree in biochemistry from Arizona State University, he is a largely self-taught composer and musician, having mastered the electric and double bass, guitar, banjo, accordion, flute, drums, various percussion instruments and various analog synthesizers and drum machines. Ismaily has recorded or performed with an incredibly diverse assemblage of musicians, including Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed, Tom Waits, Jolie Holland, Laura Veirs, Bonnie Prince Billy, Faun Fables, Secret Chiefs 3, John Zorn, Elysian Fields, Shelley Hirsch, Niobe, Will Oldham, Nels Cline, Mike Doughty (of Soul Coughing), Graham Haynes, David Krakauer, Billy Martin (of Medeski Martin and Wood), Carla Kihlstedt’s Two Foot Yard, the Tin Hat Trio, Raz Mesinai and Burnt Sugar. He has also composed regularly for dance and theater, including for Min Tanaka, the Frankfurt Ballet and the East River Commedia. Recently he composed the score for the critically acclaimed movie Frozen River, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. He was also an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in San Francisco, CA in 2008. Currently based in New York , Ismaily has studied music extensively in Pakistan, India, Turkey, Mexico, Santiago, Japan, Indonesia, Morocco and Iceland.

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Marc Ribot’sCeramic Dog recording has been listed #1 by Ted Drozdowski in his Boston Phoenix 2008 Listravaganza, ahead of recordings by Mars Volta, Ani DiFranco, The Black Keys and Guns ‘n’ Roses (well now that one surprised us).

With Labor Day around the corner, we thought we would sum up some of this summer’s better reviews as a way of saying goodbye summer hello Fall.

We start off with a 4 star review by Ted Drozdowski in the Boston Phoenix. Ted describes Party Intellectuals and Marc’s playing as “…70s funk echoes of Todo el Mundo Es Kitsch and Pinch to the campy Eurotrash arrangement of For Malena to the ambient SHSH SHSH. Humor, melody, and weirdness rule, and that makes Ceramic Dog lighter than both Ribots Los Cubanos Postizos Afro-Cuban band and his aggro-noise outfit Shrek, even when his playing  supported by percussionist Ches Smith and bassist Shahzad Ismaily  is impossibly heavy.”

Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog was reviewed on NPR’s Day to Day by David Was on the 4th of July. Calling Marc “…Mercurial in the best possible sense…” David hypes the new Ceramic Dog recording Party Intellectuals with this pretty weighty line, “… one expects this recording to be nothing less than a meditation on modern music.”

Our week was capped off with this great review of our latest release: Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog’s Party Intellectuals in theNew York Times Sunday Playlist where Nate Chinen wrote: “…the musicianship is intense regardless of the subtext, with all three players hurling themselves into their effort. They have an equally convincing way with bruising thrash punk, one-chord-vamp heroics and brooding atmospherics. And with one Cuban-flavored ballad, “For Malena,” Mr. Ribot expresses evidence of a heart to match his reserve of wits and soul.” Thanks Nate!

If you haven’t heard Ceramic Dog yet, you will. Pi Recordings will be releasing their first recording Party Intellectuals next week. Curious what they sound like? Here’s how Marc describes their origins, “..apparently born out of a quasi-freakout regarding his sudden need to rock. “It was one of those blinding, post-9/11 revelations of: ‘Oh my God — I’m going to die someday, and I haven’t directly tried to do a rock band,’ ” he recalls. “And as with many of those blinding revelations, it turned out to be partly valid and partly bullshit.”